Mothers Before Us
by mercurybard
Summary: Genfic: For 300 years, the Covenant thought the Putnam line was dead. There was a reason for that.


Disclaimer: I don't own _The Covenant_, though I have the DVD. ::huggles her DVD:: Some lines taken directly from the movie.

For dragonsinger, who really, really wanted _Covenant_ fic.

-----

Caleb had never come so close. Had never used so much power. When he'd looked over from the vision of the darkling and seen the logging truck bearing down on him, his first thought was 'well, this is it'. The Power would never have the chance to sink its claws into him—he was going to die in a car accident before Ascending. Just like Pogue's parents.

Then, in the instant of impact, instinct took over. Somehow, his subconscious mind had reached out and took hold of the Power. For a moment, he was nothing but pure energy, moving _through_ the truck and its load of timber. Then, he was on the other side, the Mustang reconstituting itself around him.

He'd been too scared to see straight. Too close, too much, he thought as he opened the door to the little roadside convenience store. It was a tourist trap he'd stopped at—the kind of place that sold cedar jewelry boxes and maple candy—but it had a cooler of soft drinks.

Caleb felt eyes on his back as he fished a bottle of water out. Turning, he saw the shop's only other customer—a young woman in baggy clothes, her dark, tangled hair shrouding her face—staring at him. It wasn't that unusual. At school, girls stared and whispered as he walked past. His mother stared at him when she thought he wouldn't notice, her hazel eyes welling up with a pain he could do nothing to lighten. Even waitresses stared, and he knew from experience that the look promised a free piece of pie.

But this was different. Her face was cold as she twisted the cap off her pop without taking her eyes off him. There was something calculating in her expression that made him want to squirm a little. The crow's feet in the corners of her eyes were deep groves that hint at age the rest of her didn't show.

"He's testing you."

She skirted the table of painted cowbells that stood between them and took the water bottle out of his hand. "Who's 'he'?" Caleb asked as she tossed the water back into the cooler.

The question was ignored, but she handed him a bottle of green Gatorade. "Drink this. Your electrolytes are off." Grabbing her own Mountain Dew off the cowbell table, she started for the door.

"Hey!"

She paused, looking back over her shoulder.

"You never answered the question."

"If you're lucky, you'll never need to know the answer." For a span of a heartbeat, her form wavered, and he saw what she really was…had been? The homeboy jeans and oversized Megadeth t-shirt had hidden scars: flesh like melted wax, hair mostly burned away, an arm twisted into agonizing uselessness. The same fingers that had held his drink were nail-less stumps scorched by fire. It was just a moment in time, and then she was gone, the bell above the door tolling out her exit.

-----

The Gatorade did help clear the woozy feeling from his head, and he wondered how she knew. Wondered who sent the darkling to him and if it had been her. No, he told himself, only someone with Power could have done that, and he'd never heard of a woman being able to tap into that seductive wellspring. He thought about telling Pogue or maybe Tyler, but then he ran into Kate and Sarah at the drug store and forgot.

Until he saw her again, standing in the long grass surrounding the Putnam barn, the sleeves of her undershirt a flash of white against wood aged gray over more than three centuries. If Sarah noticed her, she didn't say anything. Briefly, Caleb wondered if Sarah _could _notice her. There was a feeling in the air of wrongness, and her eyes looked strangely dark, even from a distance.

The stranger watched his car as it passed. When he looked back in the mirror, he saw her turn and walk into the barn. She wasn't here for him, he thought and knew in his gut that it was true. For some reason, it gave him a feeling of relief.

-----

The night of his second vision of the darkling, he went out looking for her. The logical part of him told him to stay in bed, out of the rain. Just because she had come to town at the same time someone—maybe Reid, maybe not—had begun using enough to wake him from a dead sleep was probably nothing more than a coincidence. But, logic or not, his gut guided him out into the fog on Marblehead where he found her standing at the edge of the sea cliffs.

"Go home!" she shouted above the pounding of the surf.

For a moment, he thought she was going to jump, but then she turned and glared at him from behind her wild curtain of hair. "What's your name?" he asked.

She regarded him with callous eyes before answering. "Gail Pope."

"What do you want with me?" The rain had paused briefly when he got out of the car, but then the sky opened up again and drenched him anew. "Are you the one who sent the darkling to me and Pogue?"

"No, that wasn't me." Between the wind and waves, she had to yell to be heard. "I'm just here for my cousin. Don't interfere!"

"Interfere with what?"

The look she gave him was scathing. "But you won't. You of the covenant of silence never stick your necks out…not for my kin."

Caleb felt his insides go cold. "What do you know about the Covenant?"

"Don't worry, warlock—I won't tell."

Above their heads, lightning cut the sky. When the flash faded from his vision, she was gone again, and his skin tingled like it did when one of the others used around him.

-----

"Tell me how this fits together." Caleb stood outside his car in the Spenser parking lot, mindless of the rain. He hadn't been surprised to find her leaning against the Mustang when he finished breaking into the administration office. In fact, he'd been expecting it. "The spiders, the darkling—Goody Pope, Gail Pope…Chase Goodwin _Pope_. He's your cousin, isn't he?"

The girl who called herself 'Gail' nodded. Her hair clumped around her face like hanks of wet seaweed.

"And Agnes Goodwin Pope?"

Her words, when she spoke, had the same cant and flow as the Book of Damnation. "'And she, in the months of her mourning, welcomed an incubus into her bed and held him to her bosom. He had come to her specifically because she was of the old blood, and he wished to breed in her a son of great power.'"

"An incubus—that's what Goody Pope claimed John Putnam was," he whispered, not sure that she could hear him above the wind. How many Saturday mornings had he spent in the basement of the old colony house, curled up with the Book of Damnation? The others had all read it through once, as instructed by Gorman, but he was the one who kept coming back to the secrets of his ancestors. He'd secretly hoped the old book would give him the answers his father couldn't provide. "Her son Hagen was born over ten months after Jacob—her husband—died. Hagen was John Putnam's, wasn't he? She brought that charge against him to spare herself the _Scarlet Letter_-treatment."

"'Fearing for her life, should the other colonists discover that she too was a witch, she fled from Ipswich into the wilderness and raised up her son in secret. And when, in his nineteenth year, lightning clove from the sky and filled him with great fury, she swore that she and all the daughters of her line would stand between the people of God and the devil she had borne." She pushed some of the hair away from her face with an impatient hand. "I'm the last of that line as Chase is the last of Putnam's devil-sons."

"That…face you showed me before. You were in the other vehicle in his adoptive parents' accident, in the truck that they hit dead-on on Route 9," he guessed.

"Perceptive _and_ powerful." A smile quirked her lips, and for a brief moment, he saw the damage the accident had done again. "But not powerful enough. The sons of John Putnam don't keep to your Covenant. You go against him, and he'll kill you."

"What about you?" He reached out and touched her jaw, the afterimage of the skin there red and ribbed with painful scars burned into his brain. "Looks like he almost killed you. I'm not sure I could heal so much damage, if it'd been me."

Gail didn't flinch away like he'd expected her to. Instead, she let him tilt her head to give him a better look at her face and those burning, hateful eyes. "It's harder for us"—and Caleb knew she spoke of herself and her ancestors—"But we don't succumb as quickly." Sliding along the Mustang's side, she slipped out of his grasp. "Let me handle, Chase, warlock. You seem decent enough…for one of your kind." She turned on her heel and jogged off into the rain.

-----

It was over, finally. Even the smoke from the barn had almost dissipated, though the smell of burnt timber still hung in the damp morning air. There'd be more rain today—Caleb could practically taste the power of the incoming storm on the back of his tongue. Everything seemed sharper, crisper, louder now that he'd Ascended, whether it was the birds chirping in the trees around him or the crackle of the firemen's radios as they dug through the remains of the Putnam barn.

'We searched the entire area," one of the firefighters reported. "We didn't find anybody."

Looking up at him from the passenger seat of his car, Sarah asked, "How can that be?" She looked small and scared huddled in his coat, her dress stained with mud and rainwater.

Caleb looked out across the field to the remains of the barn, not sure how to answer her. If Chase had been killed during their fight, he should have felt it…or so he thought. But that didn't explain why there wasn't a body—alive or dead—inside what was left of the barn.

Then he saw her, standing at the edge of the trees just past the barn, hair tucked behind her ears, exposing her moon pale face. Gail's eyes were as black as night as they stared across the field at him. _I have him_, the look seemed to say, _Don't come after us_. Then, she was gone, only a small ripple in the Power marking where she'd been.

She had her duty to her family, same as he did. The Covenant would have to trust that she could keep Chase neutralized if he ever recovered.

"Where is he?" Sarah asked as he got into the car.

"I don't know," Caleb lied.


End file.
